West and Plath | TheArticle

It’s surprising that neither Sylvia Plath’s extensive journals and letters nor any of her biographers mention the main influence on her dark comedy: Nathanael West.  Dorothy Parker’s

description of West’s best novel, The Day of the Locust (1939), sounds exactly like The Bell Jar (1963): “Wildly funny, desperately sad, brutal and kind, furious and patient, there was no

other like Nathanael West”. Except for Plath.  Like West, Plath uses satiric comedy as a weapon against the demons of sex and death, and her therapeutic laughter relieves the high tension

and pathological trauma. “Mirth cannot move a soul in agony,” Shakespeare wrote, but both writers alleviate agony with dark comedy.

The novels of West and Plath are realistic and grotesque, savage and shocking, sadistic and cruel, bitter and sexually humiliating.  They combine black humour with gruesome imagery, hilarity

with excruciating embarrassment.  Their extreme sensations and aesthetics of pain originate in the squalid self-hatred and bizarre behavior of Dostoyevsky’s characters.  Like the Russian,

West and Plath scream at the injustice of the world.  The anti-hero in Notes from Underground masochistically asks, “Does my liver hurt?  Good, let it hurt even more.”  In The Possessed,

when a pompous man boasts “they won’t lead me around by the nose,” the manic Stavrogin grabs his nose and pulls his victim across the crowded room.

West’s Day of the Locust alludes to one of the twelve plagues sent by God to deliver Israel from Egyptian bondage.  In Exodus 10:12,15.”the Lord said unto Moses, stretch out thine hand over

the land of Egypt for the locusts. . . . They covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened.”  The plague of locusts advanced like an army or a raging fire and brought

famine and starvation.  This prophecy of doom and destruction is portrayed in West’s novel by Tod Hackett’s painting The Burning of Los Angeles, itself inspired by the paintings of The

Burning of the Library of Alexandria, a treasure house that Julius Caesar destroyed in 48 B.C.  But even this picture of conflagration has its bright side: “Tod was going to show the city

burning at high noon, so that the flames would have to compete with the desert sun and thereby appear less fearful, more like bright flags flying from roofs and windows than a terrible

holocaust.”

At the end of the first chapter West explains how to extract laughter from horror: “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible”—but it can

be done.  West’s characters cherish their illusions and live, both in and out of movies, in an unreal world.  The screenwriter Claude Estee inhabits a fake Southern plantation that

resembles a Hollywood stage set.  There’s a ludicrous disconnect when he shouts to his butler to bring the appropriate drink: “Here, you black rascal!  A mint julep” and “a Chinese servant

came running with a Scotch and soda.”  Appearance and play-acting are more important than actuality and protect the characters from the pain of the harsh world.  West’s wildly chaotic

characters experience cruelty, sexual frustration and brutal violence, but actually “enjoy suffering.”  They display “agonised grins,” behave with “grotesque depravity” and suddenly “leap

into the air with twisted backs like hooked trout” with wounded mouths.

Tod idealises courts, flatters, bribes and pleads with the beautiful but vacuous Faye Greener, and fantasises about having sex with her.  But his dreams bring more pain than pleasure. 

Echoing “time to murder and create” in T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Tod imagines that sex with Faye would be suicidal: a screaming and castrating defenestration ending with a shattered skull

and spine: “Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love.  If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the

parapet of a skyscraper.  You would do it with a scream.  You couldn’t expect to rise again.  Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be

broken.”  When Tod can’t sleep with Faye, he also dreams of raping her.  His impulse was “to throw her down in the soft, warm mud and to keep her there. . . . Nothing less than violent rape

would do. . . . It was her completeness, her egg-like self-sufficiency, that made him want to crush,” shatter and penetrate her.  Tod’s self-torturing reactions to Faye are so weird, his

fantasies so extreme and so far from sexual enjoyment that they take on a comic element.

West’s novel concludes with a crescendo of violence.  When preparing to roast quails for their perilous picnic, the handsome silent cowboy Earle Shoop “caught the birds one at a time and

pulled their heads off.”  The cockfight is a spectacle of cruelty performed before a hysterical crowd.  The dwarf Abe Kusich “had his bird off first, but Juju rose straight in the air and

sank one spur in the red’s breast.  It went through the feathers into the flesh. . . . The red met him by going back on his tail and hooking upward like a cat.  Juju landed again and again.

  He broke one of the red’s wings, then practically severed a leg. . . . The red thrust weakly with its broken bill.  Juju went into the air again and this time drove a gaff through one of

the red’s eyes and into its brain.”

The violence of the cockfight continues as four men—Tod, Earle, the Mexican Miguel and Abe Kusich—compete unequally to attract and conquer Faye.  Earle dances intimately with her.  Abe the

dwarf tries to cut in, Earle kicks him in the stomach and knocks him over, and “everyone laughed.”  Abe then charges between Earle’s legs and crushes his balls.  Earle screams, groans, sinks

to the floor and tears off Faye’s pajamas on the way down.  (Abe belongs to the traditional portraits of evil dwarfs that include Alberich in Wagner’s Ring, the antihero in Per Lagerkvist’s

 The Dwarf and the malignant Mexican at the end of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.)

At the end of the novel, Faye’s hopeless robotic suitor Homer Simpson jumps on and tramples the annoying child-actor Adore.  West portrays defensive laughter in both the first and last

chapters to mitigate these cruel and violent scenes.  As Tod gets swamped by the raging crowd at the movie premiere and is arrested, his screams—a recurrent motif—mingle with the wail of the

police car: “The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. . . .  For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he

could.”  West’s friend Scott Fitzgerald praised West’s achievement.  He “was impressed by the pathological crowd at the premiere,” the character and behaviour of Faye Greener, and the

uncanny “Hollywood background set off by those vividly drawn grotesques.”

The name of Esther Greenwood, the heroine of The Bell Jar, suggests—like Faye Greener—a naïve and innocent young woman.  Like Tod Hackett, she is intelligent and cynical, frustrated and

alienated in a hostile world.  She has no experience of love, babies or death, and is victimised and tormented.  The novel opens in June 1953 with the electrocution in Sing Sing prison of

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.  Anticipating her electric shock treatments (and hinting at Tod’s Burning of Los Angeles) Esther exclaims, “The idea of

being electrocuted makes me sick . . . but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.”

The Bell Jar is a rebellious assault on well-mannered hypocritical behaviour.  Plath attacks the complacent and counterfeit lives of the Eisenhower 1950s, and even describes, in her

favourite homunculus image, Richard Avedon’s searing portrait of the 74-year-old former president “bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle.”  She’s both hypersensitive and

masochistic, and her vitriolic fury is as fierce as a razor blade.  The novel compounds, in a squeamish way, overwhelming tragedy and gallows humour.  Writing from the eye of a tornado and

with a voice sounding from her bones, Plath casts a cold eye on a series of disasters: ptomaine poisoning, public puking, pickled foetuses, carved cadavers and a massive haemorrhage as well

as deep depression, attempted suicide, lobotomy, hanging and insane asylums.  Hospitals to Plath were like daffodils to Wordsworth.

Plath’s novel erupts with contemptuous, malicious and vengeful satire on herself, her family and her friends.  Esther is simultaneously charming and cruel, engaging and offensive, and

emphasises disgusting details with morbid sensitivity and lacerating introspection.  As Esther piles on the horrors, the scenes of menace and terror are—like West’s—funny, in a ghoulish sort

of way.  Esther’s life is miserable and gets worse.  She feels as if she “were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.”  Not a return to a comfortable

womb, but to an asphyxiating torture chamber.  She dreams of escaping from her unbearable existence, but chooses the horrible Japanese seppuku, or ritual disembowelment, as her ideal form of

suicide: “in one quick flash, before they had time to think twice, they would jab the knives in and zip them round, one on the upper crescent, and one on the lower crescent, making a full

circle.  Then their stomach skin would come loose, like a plate, and their insides would fall out, and they would die”—like the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima.  “Zip” captures the

grotesquely comic aspect of self-mutilation.

Esther has to deal with and dispatch the oppressive parents who have ruined her life.  Her father abandoned her in childhood by dying prematurely, her mother damaged her with unbearable

love.  Esther “had a great yearning, lately, to pay my father back for all the years of neglect, and start tending his grave.”  She means, with deliberate ambiguity, that she will either

repay him for neglecting his grave or take revenge on him for neglecting her.  When Plath actually visited her father’s grave in a Boston cemetery, she had a necrophilic desire to dig him up

and examine the decomposed remains of his body.  “Daddy,” her most savage poem, portrays her German father as a Nazi and herself as his Jewish victim.  She kills Otto Plath in her poem for

killing himself in life.  Both her father and her husband, Ted Hughes, abandoned her.  The poem twists suddenly at the end to attack the vampiric father of her children, who destroyed her

life and eventually drove her to suicide:

In the last line the aggressively familiar  “Daddy” also refers to the treacherous “Teddy”.

Only after Plath had destroyed the part of her mother in herself, exhausted her feelings of gratitude, and rejected the maternal concepts of work, love, marriage, home and family, could she

finally express her hatred of Aurelia Plath.  Esther expresses her murderous desire to throttle her mother’s neck and says that when she was sleeping near her snoring parent, “the piggish

noise irritated me, and for a while it seemed to me that the only way to stop it would be to take the column of skin and sinew from which it rose and twist it to silence between my hands.” 

Like Plath, Esther is ecstatic when her psychiatrist finally gives her permission to hate her mother.

Esther’s suitors are comically grotesque.  Fascinated by repulsive figures, she wittily describes an unfortunate blind date: “some pale, mushroomy fellow with protruding ears or buck teeth

or a bad leg.  I didn’t think I deserved it.  After all, I wasn’t crippled in any way.”  She also recalls a strangely-hatched, hunchbacked neighbour who was “apparently born without parents

of either sex.”

Esther’s clean-cut, preppy boyfriend (a Yalie like Tod Hackett) is proud of his penis and thinks his erection would excite her.  He strips naked and displays his member but provokes the

wrong response.  Instead of being impressed and aroused, she makes a withering detumescent comparison: “he just stood there in front of me and I kept staring at him.  The only thing I could

think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.”  In this scene his cock and balls resemble a fowl’s stretched neck and sack of innards.  She’s repelled by them—and

by him.

A similar scene, with the same disdainful and comical attitude toward the penis, appears in the Earl of Rochester’s play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684):

The most shocking and scary scene is Esther’s painful defloration (based on a real rape in Plath’s life) followed by a massive haemorrhage.  “A warm liquid was seeping out between my legs. .

. . The stories of blood-stained bridal sheets and capsules of red ink bestowed on already deflowered brides floated back to me. . . . I couldn’t possibly be a virgin any more. . . . I

wondered when [my roommate] Joan would notice the blood trickling down my legs and oozing, stickily, into each black patent leather shoe.  I thought I could be dying from a bullet wound. . .

. I lay, trying to slow the beating of my heart, as every beat pushed forth another gush of blood. . . . Perhaps Irwin had injured me in some awful, obscure way, and all the while I lay

there on Joan’s sofa I was really dying.”  Plath’s description combines bloody memories, ruined shoes, lost virginity and fear of death.  It is at once intensely personal and strangely

objective, as if she were detached from her own potentially fatal experience, and her brilliant dissociation from reality produces an uneasy shudder in the reader.

Though Esther is very attractive, her face is twice disfigured.  When she’s photographed for a fashion magazine she bursts into tears of self-hatred and transforms this apparently harmless

event into a tragic performance: “I felt limp and betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal.”  When she stares into a mirror her face “seemed to be peering from the grating of a

prison cell after a prolonged beating.  It looked bruised and puffy and all the wrong colours.”  After she’s achieved success on the prestigious magazine, the disastrous photo shoot—wildly

exaggerated, as always, for comic effect—makes her realise that she loathes this glossy world.

Another morbid passage describes Esther’s damaged face after she’s attempted suicide in the rocky crawl space under her house: “You couldn’t tell whether the person in the picture was a man

or a woman, because their hair was shaved off and sprouted in bristly chicken-feather tufts all over their head.  One side of the person’s face was purple, and bulged out in a shapeless way,

shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow.  The person’s mouth was pale brown, with a rose-colored sore at either corner.”  This chromatic picture of herself as a

bulging feathered person of indeterminate sex who’s referred to in the plural, recalls the self-alienation in Arthur Rimbaud’s famous declaration, “I is another.”

Esther’s shock treatment, which recalls the electrocution of the Rosenbergs, is similar in emotional intensity to the cockfight in West’s novel: “Then something bent down and took hold of me

and shook me like the end of the world.  Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would

break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.”  She gives herself another tremendous shock when merely moving her reading lamp: “Then something leapt out of the lamp in a blue flash

and shook me till my teeth rattled, and I tried to pull my hands off, but they were stuck, and I screamed, or a scream was torn from my throat, for I didn’t recognise it, but heard it soar

and quaver in the air like a violently disembodied spirit.”  Esther’s scream recalls Tod’s scream at the end of West’s novel.

Finally, Esther “wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.”  The electrical shocks seem to be punishing her for an obscure source of guilt: she hated her parents, refused to

conform, failed to achieve perfection, took bold risks, scared people and rejected her place in society.  Both West and Plath followed the tragic path of their novels and died violently in

their thirties: West in a car crash, Plath by suicide.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has recently published Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real (2016) and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy (2018).  His book on his friend James Salter will be

out in spring 2024.

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